Short Circuit is a 1986 American science fiction comedy film directed by John Badham and written by S. S. Wilson and Brent Maddock.

The film centers on an experimental military robot that is struck by lightning and gains a human-like intelligence, prompting it to escape its facility to learn more about the world.

It stars Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg, Fisher Stevens, Austin Pendleton, and G. W. Bailey; Tim Blaney is the voice of the robot Number 5.

(Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport) for the U.S. military to use in Cold War operations, though they would rather seek peaceful applications of the robots.

They find that Skroeder has called in the United States Army to capture Number 5, and on his orders, restrain Crosby and Stephanie so he can open fire.

Crosby and Stephanie are surprised to discover that Number 5 had hidden under the van, having assembled a decoy of himself from spare parts to mislead the military.

Each joint in the suit had a separate sensor, allowing the puppeteer's arm and hand movements to be transferred directly to the machine.

[6] To portray the role he had to grow a beard, dye his hair black, darken his skin with makeup, turn his blue eyes brown with contact lenses, speak with an East Indian accent and "walk hunched over like a cricket player".

According to Pendleton, the role Guttenberg ended up playing "...was a person who could not relate to other human beings, so he poured all that into the creation of the robot.

Although no soundtrack album was released at the time, El DeBarge had a chart hit with the single "Who's Johnny (Theme from Short Circuit)".

The website's consensus reads: "Amiable and good-natured but also shallow and predictable, Short Circuit is hardly as deep or emotionally resonant as E.T.

[14] Vincent Canby of The New York Times described Short Circuit as "a cheerful, inoffensive fantasy in which such attractive live actors as Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy play second fiddle to machinery" and wrote that "the movie, which has the clean, well-scrubbed look of an old Disney comedy, is nicely acted.

"[15] A reviewer for Variety called the film "a hip, sexless sci-fi sendup" and praised the writers for "some terrific dialog that would have been a lot less disarming if not for the winsome robot and Sheedy's affection for it.

[17] Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, rated Short Circuit 1.5 out of 4 stars and called it "too cute for its own good".

[18] Colin Greenland reviewed Short Circuit for issue 85 of White Dwarf and stated that "there are good jokes, but the picture's so bland they hardly count".

[21] It grossed a domestic total of $40.7 million, ranking it 21st for 1986 in the United States; it performed slightly better than other hits of that year, such as Pretty in Pink, The Fly, Three Amigos, Little Shop Of Horrors, and About Last Night.

[24] A 1987 video game based on the 1986 film of the same name was published and developed by Ocean Software for ZX Spectrum,[26] Commodore 64[27] and Amstrad CPC.

There was a script for a possible third film, where Johnny 5 went to college, that was written in 1989 and rewritten in 1990 but was found unsatisfactory by the producers, and the project was scrapped and canceled.

Johnny 5 answered questions in character in a videotaped interview with Bobbie Wygant, a reporter based in Dallas, to promote Short Circuit 2.

[30] Later in October 2009, reports circulated that Steve Carr would direct the remake and that the film's plot would involve a boy from a broken family befriending the Number 5 robot.

The company hired the writing team of Eduardo Cisneros and Jason Shuman to put a Latin twist on the screenplay for the film.

[34] Short Circuit has become subject to contemporary criticism over the casting of Stevens, a Caucasian actor, to play the Indian character Ben along with brownface makeup.

Inspired by a scene in Beverly Hills Cop (1984) in which a French shop assistant is rude to his American customers, Badham made Ben Indian, thinking the "culture mismatch was fun".